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It’s a Beacon of music

By Ned P. Rauch;
4:41 p.m. EST January 17, 2014

Jeff Wilkinson and the Shutterdogs plays at Dogwood in Beacon Jan. 9. Dogwood is one of several music venues that have popped up in Beacon over the past several years.
(Photo:
Seth Harrison/The Journal News
)

BEACON – It was a week or so into the new year, with the night air brooding at about 5 degrees above zero, when a pair of ace fiddlers took the small stage at Dogwood, a bar on a triangular lot at the east end of Main Street.

Despite the hostile temperature, despite the fact that it was 10 o’clock on a Tuesday, the place was packed. The fiddlers — Bruce Molsky, a local and a legend; and Brittany Haas, a young phenom — sawed away on their instruments for more than an hour.

Audience members cheered; a couple got up to dance. As midnight neared, Haas leaned into her microphone.

“I love Beacon,” she said.

Beacon has been earning a lot of love from musicians and music fans lately.

In just over a year, three new music venues, Dogwood, the Towne Crier — which relocated from Pawling — and Quinn’s, have opened. The Howland Cultural Center, a Main Street presence for more than a century, hosts chamber music performances and bluegrass jams. Cover bands pound away in pubs. David and Jacob Bernz, a father-and-son team, opened an instrument store, Jake’s Main Street Music, last fall. The Beacon Music Factory offers lessons to musicians of all ages and abilities.

Stephen Clair, who founded the Music Factory, says, “It’s pretty astonishing. But none of this happened in a bubble.”

Music and Beacon have a long acquaintance. The city, about 45 minutes north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, reaches inland from the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Among its 15,000 or so residents is activist and folk icon Pete Seeger, who is nearing his 95th birthday. Musicians have been gathering in each others’ homes and swapping songs for decades.

Andy Revkin, a musician and New York Times writer who has lived nearby in Putnam County since 1991, calls Seeger the “beating heart” of Beacon’s music scene.

“His burning passion for song, and eagerness to make music participatory, beat any pied piper,” Revkin writes in an email. “He can’t be with us forever, but he’s created a musical magnetism in Beacon that will reverberate for decades to come, I’m sure.”

But when Clair moved to Beacon from Brooklyn seven years ago, he says, there were no venues offering original, live music. He began organizing low-key events at galleries and coffee shops. Four years ago, he launched Beacon Riverfest, an outdoor festival that grew from four bands to 14.

Beacon was churning in other ways, too. George Mansfield, a member of the City Council and one of Dogwood’s two founders, points to the 2003 opening of Dia, a modern art museum housed in a riverside factory, and the Roundhouse restaurant as key steps in the city’s progress.

All the while, he says, the city remained relatively affordable, attracting artists and young professionals (including a steady stream from Brooklyn).

When Mansfield and his business partner, Quinn’s founder Tom Schmitz, opened Dogwood at the end of 2012, the town immediately embraced it, he says.

“People have told us they feel like it’s been here forever,” Mansfield says. “I look around and I see black people, white people, old, young, parents. Everyone is welcome.”

Fans have quickly taken to the Crier, too. At the end of December, hundreds of people attended a performance by the Felice Brothers (who, incidentally, recorded one of their albums in a former high school in Beacon). A day later, another sellout crowd showed up to see Irish rockers Black 47.

Ciganer, who says he had been so discouraged with the music business that he considered retiring, is happy he moved to town.

“The Towne Crier was always a destination club,” Ciganer says. “One thing it lacked was a real community, and there’s a real community here.”

That much is clear. Just before Christmas, Revkin celebrated the release of his album, “A Very Fine Line,” with a performance at Dogwood.

The setting made sense: He recorded it in Beacon with Joe Johnson, who helps with sound at Dogwood and the Towne Crier. Molsky, one of the aforementioned fiddle masters, played on it.

During Revkin’s show, musicians from Beacon, Cold Spring and Garrison joined him onstage. On a song or two, audience members bellowed the choruses.

David Bernz, who opened the instrument store with his son, was there. He was there for the late-night Molsky-Haas show, too.

“They want something that’s real,” he said of Beacon’s music fans. “They don’t want some pop culture thing, they want what we’re having tonight, a fiddler, or maybe a blues player. But they want something that’s real, and they recognize it when they see it.”

379 Main St., 845-855-1300, www.townecrier.com. Bright lights, big stage. The Crier, which built its reputation over a quarter-century in Pawling before moving to Beacon, books national acts and can accommodate up to 250 people. Full restaurant with delicious pastries, too.

Dogwood

, 47 East Main St., 845-202-7500, www.dogwoodbar.com. A friendly neighborhood bar and restaurant where everybody seems to know everybody’s name. The cozy stage is typically packed with regional and local artists, but keep an eye out for the occasional movie screening, too. The short rib chili is top-shelf.

Quinn’s,

330 Main St., 845-202-7447. Opened by one of the guys who opened Dogwood, Quinn’s is a long shoebox of a diner with throwback decor and a stage near the entrance. Jazz on Mondays nights, rock and folk on other nights, sushi on the menu every night.

Howland Cultural Center,

477 Main St., 845-831-4988, www.howlandculturalcenter.org. Built in the late 1800s as a library, this stately hall has the best natural acoustics in town and capacity for about 120 people. Run by a non-profit, the Howland hosts a wide range of cultural events.